Never Completely Awake, poems by Martina Newberry by Deerbrook Editions

Never Completely Awake Martina Reisz Newberry poems

deerbrook editions

publish ed b y

Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 207.829.5038 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions first edition

Titles 1. Beautiful 2. The Falling Years 3. Owl 4. Fancy/Domesticated 5. The Way Time Is Not Measured 6. After The Hurricane, Round II 7. 100 Decibels At 2 Meters 8. Pantoum For My City 9. At The Wax Museum On Hollywood Boulevard 10. Gifts 11. Hours Later 12. Boundless And Bare 13. Later On 14. Sleeping In The Closet In The Storm 15. A Moment’s Peace 16. Finches 17. Ashtanga 18. “. . . The Way A Stone Retains A Warmth From The Sun . . .” 19. The Detracted Owlet (Moth) 20. The Mother 21. Hallways 22. They Fell On The Hoods Of Cars 23. View Of Gerlach, NV From The Burning Man Office 24. Collected Letters 25. Rivers 26. The Great Nations 27. Tentans Vestium 28. Revenant 29. Strolling / Flying 30. Making The Recording 31. The Ozymandias Effect 32. Immolation 33. Thelma’s Louise 34. Elements Of Estrangement 35. Walker 36. Divination 37. Holiday 38. That’s When I Woke Up

39. Shampoo 40. 60-Watt Bulb 41. Ten Thousand Taste Buds 42. Heat Lightning 43. Politics As Usual 44. A Silence Like No Other 45. At Grass 46. Sweet Tooth 47. Dye Job 48. With An Ounce Of Benedictine. 49. Floaters 50. Untitled 51. Pre-Owned 52. A Paler Shade Of White 53. Women Like Me 54. Pelican 55. Stories Aboard The Empress Of Ireland 56. Magic 57. Lucid Dreaming 58. Pigeon With One Leg 59. Choosing Names 60. After The Fire 61. Modern Medicine 62. Heart Screams And The Rain 63. Self Portraits 64. Torch Song 65. What Bert Did 66. Glamor Shot 67. Continuum 68. When Winter Came 69. Sin Tocar 70. Letter From Los Angeles 71. Dispensation 72. When The Wind Stopped 73. “. . . A Characteristically Postmodern Rejection Of Metaphysics.” 74. Thursday’s Child 75. Never Completely Awake 76. Sermon 77. John O’hara’s Hat 78. Dinner Party

79. Photos T aken With My Cellphone 80. Ciudad De Los Angeles Caidos 81. T almud 82. A Thank-You For The Large Bottle Of Bubbles My Daughter Gave Me For Mother’s Day 83. Cover 84. Portents 85. Ossuary 86. Jeff ’s Iris 87. Doing The Two-Step In Albany 88. Ordinary Life 89. Dusk 90. Flatbread 91. Billowy Blouses 92. Stems 93. Nowhere 94. Portrait Of A Sitting Woman 95. The Msolo Tree Only Sheds Its Leaves At Night 96. Wrack Zone 97. Awake 98. A Short Treatise 99. Mandibles Acknowledgments Redactions

But ah! — to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike! Would that it were day again! “Ashes of Life” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

For my Sisters: Deb, Kate, Chris, Tâ&#x20AC;&#x160;rish, Lizbeth, Marcella, Marianne, Meggie M, Sabrina, and for my Aunt Jan who is and always has been there . . . with more love than I can talk about

1. Beautiful for my Aunt Jan who is . . . Beautiful isn’t it, the way some beaches are sand and some are small, smooth rocks and Beautiful the way the water bends like molten silver when the weather is hot and it’s late in the afternoon? Beautiful the way the sky tears down the middle for lightning and mends again later on Beautiful how breath turns white in the cold and how the world’s roads move across the land no matter what Beautiful, isn’t it, the way love rhymes with glove and silk rhymes with milk and rage rhymes with cage? Beautiful the way the light stays on and on during the Summer months and a different kind of Beautiful when Fall makes it fade early Beautiful the cleanliness of bones in moonlight when the desert is silent and without wind Beautiful the cool rind of a honeydew melon and the perfume inside it inviting taste Beautiful, the way a woman hums to herself

while she gets dressed and sighs one hundred sighs when she undresses Beautiful the accident of passion, the brush of hands, then mouths, then bodies doing more than brushing— flesh on flesh to music older than the stars Beautiful, the smell of soap and burning wood and frying onions and a diner far up the road that you didn’t know was there Beautiful, isn’t it, the smooth red bark of the manzanita plant and a long teardrop earring that touches a woman’s neck and how Beautiful a full cupboard jars of delicious things There is the Beautiful ice sculpture with perfect pink shrimp surrounding and the Beauty of buttered potatoes Beautiful the strange trailing roots of water lilies and the zippers on dark leather jackets Beautiful the figurine of the two-headed saint and the red satin lining of the box it came in Beautiful a new book, a new shirt, new sheets, a new pen. Beautiful the lover that used to matter,

the one that matters now, and the ones that never mattered Beautiful a pain that stops, a cut that heals, a scar that was earned, not inflicted Beautiful a hand sitting in for your mother’s hand a dance, a smile sitting in for the ones your mother could not give Did I say how Beautiful is the purity of a man’s shaved head or the long, dark hair, a man might have—like a river down his back Beautiful a drinking glass so clean it looks like water holding itself Beautiful, a runner, a cyclist, Kabballah, birthday cake Beautiful a childhood that might never have been but was Beautiful, the way you read or hear this poem— your eyes wishing for everything, wanting this to be one thing that will not be content, one thing that will not be captured.

2. The

Falling Years

The deity that rises in my dreams has long, pale feet like mine and bitten nails, is the overseer of all known things. She has metal taps on her shoes, dances Coraboree throughout the night. She smells like opals and Ovaltine. I wake up, superstitious, gathering my charms and medallions close around me, counting and naming friends, family. I can’t afford to lose anyone. My larder is near empty as it is. Sometimes I think of Robinson Jeffers; he called these “the falling years.” Why do I know what he means? Last night I dreamed that the deity and I were squatting on the ground, examining the dainty bones of a small snake I found behind a fallingdown supermarket in Baker, CA. The ontogeny of this dream is un known to me. But, I am certain it has to do with my sins. My sins: I waste so much time staring into the center of Nothing There. I should be dancing with the deity but my children stole my dance shoes. Look, between you and me and Jesus, I wasn’t using them. I waste time by seeking eternal life in various

self-help gurus’ open-all-night signs. I waste time worrying about how not to waste time, how not to age, how not to weep. I accept everything—nothing. My deity is like me, part Jew, part not, tethered to the Church of Rome. Maybe I’ll auction myself on Ebay. I clean up pretty good, but I’m not handy. Still… when I woke this morning I remembered in an instant that I’m a woman of a certain age who cleans up pretty good but is not handy. My 6th grade teacher told my parents everything anyone ever needed to know about me: “Martina’s social skills,” she said, “are somewhat limited. She should work on this.”

3. Owl Hear that—that thumping inside your chest? That is the triumph of blood over tribulation. Get familiar. You’ll hear it many times during your haunted, long-gone life. You will open the tin of each day, see your choices laid and stacked before you like sardines and there will be that thumping. You like to think that the accoutrements of your past have earned you a future, but that thumping tells you different. You like

to think that today’s good deeds ensure tomorrow’s pleasure fields. If you listen, that thumping will return you to what is real. The earth turns, the murderers are the murdered, angels stomp their feet, spit desolation from their rouged lips. Thump-thump thump-thump . . . there it is again— the footfalls of your conscience echoing in your chest. It would be wise to pay attention while you can: the stars are grains of spilled white rice, the streams you cross are ribbons of icy vodka, the owl—blind in one eye—watches you search the streets for meaning, the sun cusses the cloud that keeps chasing him, catches then hides him while the earth shivers. Pay attention while you can: thump-thump thump-thump. Drift and fail. Drift and fail says the soul of the cosmos. Drift. Fail.

4. Fancy /Domesticated Our West-of-England Tumblers had caramel stripes on their feathers and smooth bald heads. Their feathered feet fell soft where they landed and the loft we built for them was as much a home for me as it was for them. During rains, we all watched a cloud-cluttered horizon. Those birds warmed me so that I didn’t need a jacket. They came close, perched unsteadily on my ankles, took the occasional seed from my hand. Thinking of them now, I remember the joy of naming them:

Gable & Lombard, Tracy & Hepburn, George & Gracie, Louie & Keely. How I impressed myself with telling which bird was which. On sunny mornings, in the loft, we opened the windowed perches to watch them shoot straight up to attack the sky, tumble 4 or 5 times and then fly off over places unknown to us. In the evenings they returned with bits of this and that on their fanned feet. I think of driving home from work in those days, dusted with fumbles and failures and a few successes here and there. This is not just a story about birds of a feather; it is about a quiet place with murmuring winged things and warm bodies seeking nothing more than each other. “You mustn’t yell at them” said the woman who sold us our first pair. “They will fly off and never come back if you do.”

5. The

Ways Time Is Not Measured

By the scent of Night Blooming Jasmine By the scent of brewing coffee By the scent of a newly-painted bench

By the sound of no water in the L.A. Basin By the sound of jingling tags on a dog’s collar By the sound of Eurasian Collard Doves crooning “pay attention.” By the taste of cheap razzleberry jam on the veranda of my tongue By the taste of sauteed brown trout By the taste of cold Chai Tea—almost (but not quite) cinnamon By the feel of the cat’s meaty softness By the feel of the bright constellations raining down on my toes and heels By the feel of friendships that end badly Fate’s ocean is everywhere, all around me. When you pass your 70s, no life jackets fit, you are alone in the water. I see it in my dreams: my timeline comes unhooked, floats off on its own. I grip a bit of flotsam, hanging on too tight to recapture my lovely timeline. My knuckles are white from hanging on and the timeline doesn’t care, doesn’t give a tinker’s dam for my vexation. Vexation without representation— isn’t that unconstitutional? Time is not measured in the minutes it takes to fall from night into night, from dreams into dreams. It’s really about the last few minutes of daylight and how much dark you can stand.

6. After

The Hurricane, Round II

Silence except for breezes shuffling across wounded land The roads all point to augured and remember The tops of hills washed in gray-pink light, courtesy of an unwilling setting sun White gravel like baby teeth, scattered across the lawns and parks and driveways What is left? Who knows? Signs point to: No Jesus No roses No mugs of coffee No motors No dollars No wheat fields No booze

No sex toys No rivers No Bodhissattvas No beads No magic No drugs No candy

He smiles at the space where a ceiling used to be “Shall we finish?” he asks the brunette in the blue nylon slip. “It’s all over now.” Her nod is like pure crack—a firecracker in his brain.

7. 100

Decibels At 2 Meters

The pillow has its own frequency which sometimes matches the hammering of my heart. In my 70s and I’ve not yet learned how to quiet this heart (I never even tried with my head). I can dance circles around the truth until the sun goes down, then it finds

its own way in (unless I open the door). You think I’m joking? Listen: what is real will pound on your door like a damn jackhammer. No hiding in the closet until it goes away. Reality can see you in there. If you are uncooperative, it will wait until night and then you’ll pay.

8. Pantoum

For My City

The evening assembles, takes its own time. The streets open to the insomniacs. There is a “Super Moon” inching upwards. Angry, it demands larger living space. The streets open to the insomniacs. We did not get the world we wanted today; angry, it demanded larger living space. There is the slamming of car doors, cooking smells. We did not get the world we wanted today Hear the clink of ice, the rush of liquor There is the slamming of car doors, cooking smells. The desperate wait until dark to start singing.

9. At

The Wax Museum On Hollywood Boulevard

What is a woman’s life? Is she bird, or pen

or tree or cake?

Where is she going and why the lime-green shoes with the bows on the back? Does her flesh smell of sugar or burnt oak or tea? Who will drink her from a fragile cup or thick mug? Where is a woman’s life? Is it in a stone cell a garden of marshmallows a church nave? Will she dress herself in bracelets and gauze, gifted with sparking sashes? What will she be fed? Will potato chips fall down from the sky sausages and French bread and apples tumble from the mountains? What are life’s losses—a woman’s losses? A favorite bowl with cherries ‘round the rim a poorly framed picture of two angels on a bicycle a bottle—pale blue glass, bubbled?

What is a woman’s end? In a kiosk a tent, a chrysalis, a bright yellow Cadillac with fins and leather seats?